e watched with his
own eyes a whole ream of broad glazed white paper being sliced down by
the cutter into single sheets, and thrilled with a novel ecstasy as he
laid his hand upon the spotless bulk, so wooingly did it invite him to
begin. He tried a score of pens before the right one came to hand.
When a box of these had been laid aside, with ink and pen-holders and a
little bronze inkstand, he made a sign that the outfit was complete.
Or no--there must be some blotting-paper. He had always used those
blotting-pads given away by insurance companies--his congregations never
failed to contain one or more agents, who had these to bestow by the
armful--but the book deserved a virgin blotter.

Theron stood by while all these things were being tied up together in a
parcel. The suggestion that they should be sent almost hurt him. Oh,
no, he would carry them home himself. So strongly did they appeal to his
sanguine imagination that he could not forbear hinting to the man who
had shown him the pianos and was now accompanying him to the door that
this package under his arm represented potentially the price of the
piano he was going to have. He did it in a roundabout way, with one of
his droll, hesitating smiles. The man did not understand at all, and
Theron had not the temerity to repeat the remark. He strode home with
the precious bundle as fast as he could.

"I thought it best, after all, not to commit myself to a selection," he
explained about the piano at dinner-time. "In such a matter as this,
the opinion of an expert is everything. I am going to have one of the
principal musicians of the town go and try them all, and tell me which
we ought to have."

"And while he's about it," said Alice, "you might ask him to make a
little list of some of the new music. I've got way behind the times,
being without a piano so long. Tell him not any VERY difficult pieces,
you know."

"Yes, I know," put in Theron, almost hastily, and began talking of other
things. His conversation was of the most rambling and desultory sort,
because all the while the two lobes of his brain, as it were, kept up a
dispute as to whether Alice ought to have been told that this "principal
musician" was of her own sex. It would certainly have been better, at
the outset, he decided; but to mention it now would be to invest the
fact with undue importance. Yes, that was quite clear; only the clearer
it became, from one point of view, the shadier it waxed from the